Thursday, December 29, 2016

Clearly from this and similar eloquent testimony certain members of the community have been subjected to annoyance and serious inconvenience in the pursuit of private errands of some urgency, however, recalling to mind that vain and desperate effort to prevent construction of a subway kiosk in Cambridge, Massachusetts, enshrined decades ago in the news headlines PRESIDENT LOWELL FIGHTS ERECTION IN HARVARD SQUARE, by definition the interests of the general public must not be confused with that of one or even several individuals (People v. Brooklyn & Queens Transit Corp., 258 App. Div. 753, 15 N.Y.S.2d 295, 1939, affirmed 283 N.Y. 484, 28 N.E.2d 925, 1940)

Even though I should have known from The Recognitions that the world was not waiting breathlessly for my message, that it already knew, and was quite happy to live
with all these false values, I’d always been intrigued by the charade
of the so-called free market, so-called free enterprise system, the
stock market conceived of as what was called a “people’s capitalism”
where you “owned a part of the company” and so forth. All of which is
true; you own shares in a company, so you literally do own part of the
assets. But if you own a hundred shares out of six or sixty or six
hundred million, you’re not going to influence things very much. Also,
the fact that people buy securities—the very word in this context is
comic—not because they are excited by the product—often you don’t know
what the company makes—but simply for profit: The stock looks good and
you buy it. The moment it looks bad you sell it. What had actually
happened in the company is not your concern. In many ways I thought . . .
the childishness of all this. Because JR himself, which is why he is eleven years old, is motivated only by good-natured greed. JR
was, in other words, to be a commentary on this free enterprise system
running out of control. Looking around us now with a two-trillion-dollar
federal deficit and billions of private debt and the banks, the farms,
basic industry all in serious trouble, it seems to have been rather
prophetic.

William Gaddis, born ninety-four years ago today, in a 1986 interview. For boatloads of excerpts click the Gaddis tag.

Clearly from this and similar eloquent testimony certain members of the
community have been subjected to annoyance and serious inconvenience in
the pursuit of private errands of some urgency, however, recalling to
mind that vain and desperate effort to prevent construction of a subway
kiosk in Cambridge, Massachusetts, enshrined decades ago in the news
headlines PRESIDENT LOWELL FIGHTS ERECTION IN HARVARD SQUARE, by
definition the interests of the general public must not be confused with
that of one or even several individuals (People v. Brooklyn &
Queens Transit Corp., 258 App. Div. 753, 15 N.Y.S.2d 295, 1939, affirmed
283 N.Y. 484, 28 N.E.2d 925, 1940).

- Gaddis, Frolic of His Own

Put on the lights there, now. Before we go any further here, has it ever
occurred to any of you that all this is simply one grand
misunderstanding? Since you're not here to learn anything, but to be
taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it
can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be
organized do you follow that? In other words this leads you to assume
that organization is an inherent property of knowledge itself, and that
disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from
outside. In fact it's exactly the opposite. Order is simply a thin,
perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos...

- Gaddis, JR

I know you, I know you. You're the only serious person in the room, aren't you, the only one who understands, and you can prove it by the fact that you've never finished a single thing in your life. You're the only well-educated person, because you never went to college, and you resent education, you resent social ease, you resent good manners, you resent success, you resent any kind of success, you resent God, you resent Christ, you resent thousand-dollar bills, you resent Christmas, by God, you resent happiness, you resent happiness itself, because none of that's real. What is real, then? Nothing's real to you that isn't part of your own past, real life, a swamp of failures, of social, sexual, financial, personal...spiritual failure. Real life. You poor bastard. You don't know what real life is, you've never been near it. All you have is a thousand intellectualized ideas about life. But life? Have you ever measured yourself against anything but your own lousy past? Have you ever faced anything outside yourself? Life! You poor bastard.

I *strongly* recommend you not start w *Agape.* It's the last, unfinished, and least satisfying. I've got an extra *JR* or *Frolic* around here somewhere (or will grab at a used book store or buy a new one), will ship it to you. Please start with one of those two. If you like, read the other too *then* *Recognitions* *Carpenters Gothic* and *Agape* much lesser Gaddis.

reading about "Agapē Agape" i discovered that the first word, greek for a kind of love, is pronounced differently by the brits and the yanks - self, a yank, would say "ahgahpay" - but the brits, like the greeks, say "ahgahpee"

my thought is we yanks are reasoning by incorrect analogy - were it in a different foreign language, "ay" would be right

in the same way, for years veterinarians prescribed low protein diets for cats with kidney disease because such diets had been experimentally determined to be beneficial for dogs (2008 book, "Your Cat", Elizabeth Hodgkins) - it turns out, says dr hodgkins, that the metabolisms of cats and dogs are different - hoodahthunkit?